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Stephen Yulish was always interested in UFOs and was a member of NICAP and APRO in the
1960s after reading Project Bluebook. He studied astronomy and exobiology at
Case Western Reserve University and graduated in 1969. He eventually became a
History Professor at The University of Arizona for seven years where he visited
Allen Hyneck's Tucson group. He became interested in Bible Prophecy after he had
a headon collision with Jesus Christ in 1988. He is presently disabled with MS
and writes about endtime scenarios. Email Stephen Yulish. Visit Stephen Yulish's website.
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Deconstructing UFOs in this Post Modern World
by Stephen Yulish PhD
Posted: 14:00 January 29, 2008
Much of the current search for meaning in academic circles centers on the
concept of deconstruction. First developed by German philosopher Martin
Heidegger over a century ago and later further expanded by social theorists
Derrida and Foucault, deconstruction means to take apart, to not only reverse
commonly accepted beliefs but to change them as well. It forces the
participant to dig out and question the basic underlying assumptions of any
disciplinary construct. One can therefore deconstruct any particular
sociological or philosophical theory. One can deconstruct Freudian
psychoanalytical theory as well as Darwinian concepts of natural selection.
One can deconstruct the written history of the Vietnam War or the Sixties
Hippie movement, the Age of Aquarius. It just means to question the underlying
assumptions of a particular discipline or concept or historical time period.
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My major advisor in graduate school was a prominent albeit controversial
Freudian Marxist historian who taught me to question everything about American
society. He was branded as a so called revisionist historian who painted a
different picture of American society than traditional historians. Over thirty
years ago, he taught me to deconstruct American history and to point out the
basic underlying intrinsic assumptions of American society including its
racism, sexism and social inequality. He taught me that Karl Marx wrote that
religion was the opiate of the people and Freud wrote that religion was an
illusion. Believe it or not, I was this man's personal research assistant
for three years. I carried this deconstructionist training into my teaching at
the University of Arizona even though I actually was more of a Jungian liberal
than a Freudian Marxist at the time.
This ongoing intellectual movement to question the basic underlying
assumptions of nearly everything has taken place in the context of what is
called a Post Modern world by this same intelligentsia. The former Czech
president Vaclav Havel described this Post Modern world best as a world where
'everything is possible and nothing is certain'. It is a relativistic world
where the Post Modern atheist is absolutely certain that absolutes don't
exist!
So how do we deconstruct the UFO experience in this Post Modern world? It will
not be easy but it will I believe reveal many of our underlying assumptions
that prevent us from finding the real, absolute truth about UFOs.
I have been studying the UFO phenomena for fifty years. Even though I have
never actually seen an UFO, they have always fascinated me and I likewise have
always felt that they were real and would reveal to us something very
important about ourselves and our destiny. These phenomena can be historically
deconstructed into two broad explanatory groups. One says that the phenomena
is not real and is only a figment of the viewer's imagination or
hallucinations or worse his lurid capitalist desire to generate money by
writing books or doing movies etc. The other group says that the sightings are
real but are being covered up by the government to prevent panic yet provide
new technology to the military industrial establishment.
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